An ops-focused take on a recent story about alarm fatigue, and how a Boston hospital dealt with it. When I was in Amazon, many of the teams in our division had a target to reduce false positive pages, with a definite monetary value attached to it, since many teams had "time off in lieu" payments for out-of-hours pages to the on-call staff. As a result, reducing false-positive pages was reasonably high priority and we dealt with this problem very proactively, with a well-developed sense of how to do so. It's interesting to see how the outside world is only just starting to look into its amelioration. (Another benefit of a TOIL policy ;)

Flapjack sits downstream of your check execution engine (like Nagios, Sensu, Icinga, or cron), processing events to determine if a problem has been detected, who should know about the problem, and how they should be told.